AWA RDS 20 15
Best return engagement Smokefall
Noah Haidle’s family fable captured most critics’ imaginations (including mine) when it debuted in the Goodman Theatre’s Owen studio space in the fall of 2013, but it apparently didn’t attract the audiences the Goodman thought it should. So the theater made the admirable, nearly unprecedented move of reprogramming it as the 2014–15 season opener on its Albert mainstage, with the original cast intact; Smokefall was even more resonant than the first time around.
Raise the curtain on next year’s winners now—find reviews at
timeout.com/ chicago/theater
Best first-time score for a middling musical
Sting, The Last Ship Look, this Broadway tryout came with a seriously troubled book with a head- scratching central conceit about small-town shipbuilders defiantly building one last ship to…prove…something? But if the story didn’t quite track and the characters motives were murky, Sting’s rousing score still suggested he could be the next Cyndi Lauper, as pop-stars-turned-musical-theater- composers go. Here’s hoping he gives it another try.
Best lack of scenic design
Song About Himself In the script for his latest Theater Oobleck production, about online connection or lack thereof in a surreal, virus-ravaged Internet landscape, playwright Mickle Maher specified that there be no set. So actors Diana Slickman, Colm O’Reilly and Guy Massey, surrounded by the audience, simply faded in and out of being under lighting designer Martha Bayne’s ebbing and flowing illumination—a perfect metaphor for the impersonal coldness of the technological void.
Best use of butcher paper to depict actual butchering
The Jungle
Matt Foss, who adapted and directed Oracle Theatre’s staging of Upton Sinclair’s novel
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TIMEOUT.COM/CHICAGO September–November 2015
about immigrants and the Chicago stockyards in the early 20th century, also designed its set, which employed three rolls of butcher paper mounted on a wall of the storefront space. At times they were unrolled and painted onstage with stripes to represent a jail cell, for instance. But in one striking late scene, they unfurled to reveal pre-stenciled stampeding toward Travis Delgado’s Jurgis. The work and care that went into preparing that astonishing surprise for every performance boggles the mind.
Most promising debut A Map of Virtue
Cor Theatre technically had its coming-out party in 2012 with the one-act Skin Tight, but then it dropped back off the map for two and a half years, so we’ll consider A Map of Virtue its rebirth. And what a stunner this Chicago premiere of Erin Courtney’s 2012 meditation on the capriciousness of human connection was, with stellar performances led by director Tosha Fowler. Cor’s follow-up, Love and Human Remains, was a slight misstep, but we’re stoked to chart where the new company goes from here.
PHOTOGRAPHS (CLOCKWISE FROM TOP): LIZ LAUREN; JASON FASSL; JOAN MARCUS; EVAN HANOVER
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